Affinity: Episode Recap 1-2 Recap
**SPOILER ALERT**
Table of Contents
TL;DR (Quick Overview)
Wu Nongyu gets caught up in a violent hijacking, and Xie Xinxu is the one who rescues her, mid-chase, in a genuinely unhinged rescue sequence, airborne tear and all. But right after saving her, he starts losing control himself and, in classic this-show fashion, tells her she should “be his.”
She panics and runs before things go any further. Five years later, she starts an internship at a research institute run by Gu Yanqing, a man who looks exactly like the supposedly-dead Xie Xinxu, and after a night full of missing bodies, mistaken spicy scenes, and a cadaver attack, he saves her and possessively claims her as his. Nobody believes he’s who she thinks he is. She’s right not to believe them either.
Affinity Episode Recap: 1
Sci-fi outbreak premises are a soft spot for me. This one had me hooked before the opening scene even finished. Nineteen years into a virus outbreak that’s mutated into an aggressive, antisocial B-type strain. There’s a government bureau built specifically to hunt down the infected. Exactly the kind of dystopian setup I can’t resist.
We meet our leads through their sibling dynamic first. Wu Siyuan freshly promoted into the bureau. His sister Wu Nongyu understandably nervous about how dangerous that sounds. The case he drags her along to is genuinely unsettling too, a withdrawn B-type teenager suspected of murdering his own parents.
The moment he locks eyes on her in the crowd; the show earns its first real chill. The teenager’s fixation on Wu Nongyu turns out to matter a lot because B-types are drawn to A-carriers, and she’s one of them, which sets up everything that follows.
Cut to five years later. This is where the show reveals exactly what kind of series it intends to be. Our heroine, still having nightmares understandably, is trying to build a normal life ahead of a research internship.
Her friend shows up with foraged wild mushrooms for a picnic. Which they eat. Next to a main road. I need to be honest, this is the moment the show’s reputation as a gloriously unhinged mess started making a lot of sense to me. And I say that with real affection. Truly!
While she’s mid-bathroom-break, a truck carrying dangerous B-types drives past. One of them smells her out from inside a moving vehicle. He hijacks the truck, takes her hostage, and informs her she should become his “exclusive property.” What follows is a legitimately well-shot, high-speed chase through the city. Helicopters, gunfire, the works. Whatever budget concerns show up elsewhere, this sequence delivers.
And then, mid-chase, in a moment I can only describe as cinematically committed to its own absurdity, a single dramatic tear flies from her eye and lands near Xie Xinxu, conveniently piloting a pursuit vehicle nearby. I laughed out loud! Of course, a single perfectly aimed airborne tear was required to set this whole romance in motion.
Xie Xinxu cables the fleeing truck to his own car, swings it around, and physically catches her mid-air. This Affinity hijacking rescue scene is nuts! Unfortunately at that moment, his medication starts to wear off. He starts losing control of himself and tells her to leave.
She, in a decision I would not personally endorse, stays to check on him instead of fleeing. He pulls her close, breathes her in, and delivers my favourite unhinged line of the episode, “I like your smell. Be mine, okay?” I was cackling at the sheer velocity of this man’s descent from rescuer to feral in under a minute.
She shoves an inhibitor into his hand, flees, immediately runs face-first into a pillar, and blacks out. A deeply chaotic, deeply entertaining first episode.
Affinity Episode Recap:2
Wu Nongyu wakes up in a hospital bed at the research institute, foggy on everything that happened. The official story: the whole terrifying hijacking and chase was apparently just a hallucinogenic mushroom trip. Her friend backs this up with total confidence, describing “fighting off attackers” that supposedly never existed.
A doctor named Gu Yanqing walks into the ward, who resembles Xie Xinxu. Wu Nongyu recognises him and but had heard he died four years ago so how could this be the same man? This Gu Yanqing identity mystery so early on in the piece is great.
Then, in a transition I genuinely cannot make logical sense of, hospitalization for mushroom poisoning rolls directly into orientation day for her internship. But hey, ok! The institute itself is doing “eerie but prestigious” very well.
A director who’s suspiciously enthusiastic about mushrooms even after they poisoned two interns. Gu Yanqing casually introducing a donated cadaver as their “silent teacher,” a completely normal way to greet new interns. Then two bodies vanish from the morgue with zero surveillance footage, because obviously they do, and the planned welcome dinner for the interns gets cancelled.
That night, Gu Yanqing walks Wu Nongyu back to her dorm room and as she’s about to go in, stops her at her door, tells her he “can’t take it anymore” and needs to come in. For one glorious second, I thought we were finally getting our first spicy scene. We were not. He’d gotten wet paint on his pants and needed her bathroom.
She then attempts to expose a scar she believes Xie Xinxu has by “accidentally” hitting him with the showerhead. I have to be honest, the acting in this moment did not sell the accident even slightly. He shuts her down, cold and sarcastic. She’s left embarrassed.
A call to her brother confirms Xie Xinxu really did die four years ago, which should be reassuring. And yet she still ends up wandering the cafeteria alone that same night, in a building with no phone signal, despite being visibly rattled all episode. Ma’am. Why??
A thumping noise draws her in anyway, and she’s attacked by something that looks disturbingly like one of the reanimated cadavers. Gu Yanqing appears just in time to save her, and mid-fight, declares she’s his and warns the attacker not to touch her. A line that genuinely unsettled me more than the attacker did.
Affinity Episode Recap 1-2: My Thoughts
Affinity 2026 sci-fi cdrama has fully hooked me and I did not expect that from the first two episodes alone. Wu Nongyu and Xie Xinxu chemistry is already great from the get go. The sci-fi genre are pretty solid, a virus, a bureau, dangerous infected people fixating on a girl who’s clearly connected to one of them somehow, but it’s the sheer commitment to chaos that’s winning me over.
Mushrooms next to a main road. A single perfectly aimed airborne tear mid-chase. A “can’t take it anymore” line that turns out to be about wet paint. I keep laughing at how little sense some of this makes and staying completely locked in anyway.
The Gu Yanqing situation is doing a lot of work on me already. I don’t buy the “he just looks like Xie Xinxu” excuse for one second, and neither does she, so we’re both walking around this institute quietly convinced everyone’s lying to us.
His flip from “cold and professional” to “she’s mine, don’t touch her” mid-fight was genuinely unsettling in the best way, and I’m already fully invested in finding out what he actually is. Two episodes in, deeply unhinged, deeply entertaining, exactly what I was promised.
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Affinity: All Episode Recaps and Full Reviews
Where To Watch Affinity: YOUKU English